A Place to Stand

Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

There have been previous occasions of apparent fabrication of Palestinian film & of Hamas pictures during the Lebanon war. This compares with the "marketplace bombings" of Sarajevo, 2 of which were found by the UN forensic scientists to have come from mortars located within Moslem lines & the 3rd that there was no actual evidence of an explosion & that the bodies had been dead before the time of the alleged explosion.

Probably the best known is ITN's allegedly accidental faking of a concentration camp video (orchestrated without Moslem administration help). In that case the judge summed up for ITN by saying that though LM magazine had proved their claim that the video was faked was "essentially true" that "didn't matter" & the jury obediently did their duty. Fortunately French courts are more trustworthy.

This is not an isolated instance or even 2 or 3 isolated instances. This is a clear & long term trend of our media either deliberately lying or, at best making no real attempt to distinguish between the truth & a lie. It also shows that when caught out their corrections if any (though the Scotsman ran it I say nothing on BBC or ITN are not only long after the damage has been done but comparatively short & well hidden. Also, obviously, the victims of such allegedly accidental fabrications are uniformly of people the media want us to hate.

They say pictures never lie & it is certainly the case that we have reason to believe stories backed by pictures in preference to simple news stories. However it is quite clear that pictures do lie & that we are being constantly lied to by our media, whenever there is somebody we are supposed to hate.

It appears BT is putting up money purely to publicise it internationally which seems a good idea - such prizes are to the benefit of the whole world & the more people who here about them, either as possible contestants or donors, the better. Sounds like a very good investment for BT in terms of global prestige & advertising to. I guess the Foundation have, or are on the cusp of having, a bunch of rich donors to put up the £300 million.

What is Gordo up to. Only a few days he said the world needs 1,000 more nuclear reactors & Britain should play a part, though only by allowing foreign companies to build them, definitely with zero government subsidy.

Today he says we need windmills & should subsidise them by £100 billion

No "financial incentives" for nuclear, correctly, because it doesn't need them. But how much more obvious could he be in showing that windmills [hoped to be 14% of our electricity at £100 billion] compared to an unnamed but clearly large part of our power [at zilch] are not a good option. This works out at about £7 billion per GW of windmill power whereas internationally GW nuclear reactors have been built for $1 billion (£500 million) & as

Brown estimated that the renewables programme would generate around 160,000 jobs, and plans for new nuclear power stations around 100,000,

proves the running costs of windmills will also be far higher.

This is the time for the Tories to say that they have looked at the figures, done a "serious reappraisal", "been willing to admit past errors" etc etc & accept that nuclear is affordable, CO2 free & actually works & that it is government's duty to ensure the lights don't go out so we should go for it in a big way. Gordon came close to outflanking the Tories on going for nuclear in the first place. Now he is fumbling the ball while being open about how very expensive such a fumble is.

I think this would work partly because people are not as convinced of the infallibility of any politician as long as they never admit an error & even more so because it quite clear from polls that the public themselves are going through such a reappraisal of windmillery & nuclear.

The Tories could now take back the place as economically competent on this subject. It would mean ditching their friendship with the Green party but not with true environmentalism since nuclear can correctly be sold as CO2 free non-polluting & with the advantage that it doesn't disfigure the countryside. They can therefore maintain or even enhance their position as the true environmentalists while no longer leaving themselves vulnerable to the inevitable stab in the back by the Green leaders who are universally unappeasable Luddites & bureaucratic pseudo-leftists.

I'm for that. I don't think it is as useful as a prize for a reusable shuttle just because the immediate profits to be made on a battery are much clearer but $300 million would still help - indeed for the effect this would have it is probably too low a prize

Up till now I haven't been able to see which candidate I could feel strongly about (except Hilary but not in a nice way). McCain struck me as dangerous, in that he had supported bombing Yugoslavia & generally any sort of military action against anybody. Obama seems to be a complete chancer with lots of image, no sensible policies & unworthy of trust. On that basis, since our minimum interest is more that the US should do no harm than that it be run competently I inclined towards Obama. However if America can play a positive role in human development then that tops everything. By going for this system of encouraging innovation, even though a battery isn't my best target, McCain has shown that he gets the idea.

It is a much better target than Alex Salmond's £10 million ($20M) prize for a commercial sea turbine about which I waxed lyrical though I would like to think McCain had heard of & been influenced by it.

JunkScience rubbished it on the grounds that McCain, at the same time, suggested a massive tax break for electric cars, which is a true criticism but I think ignores political realities.

Which shows he just doesn't get it. That is precisely what went wrong with America's space programme. When they got back they were left with no mission & a massive bureaucracy called NASA which has absorbed money ever since.

Now if only he would turn 1/4 of NASA's $16 billion annual budget into funding an X-Prize Foundation for space development. The very worst that could happen is that nobody would win any prizes which would leave a lot of money lying around but there is no way some wouldn't be won. Obama is already on record as saying he would take part of NASA's budget for early education so McCain would certainly have a free run if he decided to do this.

Note also that it is proper to maximise the use you get out of such prize money. Assuming that the first prize would take 4 years (Jerry assumes 5) an initial grant of $4 billion & 4 more annual ones, assuming 10% growth a year which is only slightly above inflation plus economic growth, amounts to $24.4 billion but assuming 6% interest on the money held would increase it to $27.2 billion. If Burt Rutan could get into space on a $10 million prize I think $27 billion would move the world.

What is needed is another Bjo Trimble get people writing to him, indeed to both candidates, to say so.

UPDATEJerry has posted in full the except of the above I sent him & replied:

Further on he gives an expansion of the Obama quote I reproduced. The sentence before what I quoted goes "But I don't think a $300 million prize is enough." which considerably ameliorates his apparent objection to X-Prizes & makes at least a large part of the objection merely to it being to low a figure with which I have can agree.

Radio Scotland ran a on a report from the Centre for Policy Studies that windmills are unreliable & expensive. Possibly tomorrow they will cover a report that Queen Anne has died. Nonetheless it is unusual for the BBC to report on anything against eco-nutery though the only guest they chose to discuss with this was from the Sustainable Development Commission. Anyway it went on to a phone in & rang & got on air. I hung my remarks on the comparison with the previous item they had done - a report from Mumbai on how it is industrialising but how intermittent electricity supplies are & how a Scottish firm is helping in their long term plan to increase India's generating capacity from 120 GW to 1,000 GW.

I said that we are playing around with windmills, only 3% of our electricity, as Scotland moves towards losing half our power. While seeing India industrialising we de-industrialise & in time they will pass us. In answer to a question from Garry I said we should go for as much nuclear as required, at 1.3p a unit & that nuclear at 2 deaths since Chernobyl was far safer than coal at 150,000 a year.

I didn't get as much time as Maf Smith from the SDC but I think I got my point across. The BBC constantly invites guests only from the Luddite side & of course, only ever ask them supportive questions. This is scandalous in what is supposed to be an impartial news service but I suppose we get used to it. Phoners seemed fairly evenly divided on nuclear & generally unsupportive of wind which is an improvement on previous programmes.

The bit of the 3rd para edited was probably because it was moving into more controversy & thus blunting my main point, particularly by saying that house prices are largely regulatory, in what is anyway a fairly long letter. but I think it is important not merely to complain but to put forward alternatives.------------------------------------------To be fair Brian Ashcroft is Mr Wendy Alexander & it may be that he is being over cautious about progress but I think not.

I put up a reply saying in detail why this is a complete abuse of statistics & thus science. I am pleasantly surprised to see that all most all other commentators understood this too. I am reprinting it here because such "studies" are very common space fillers in the media & the same basic reasons why they are fraudulent apply to most of them.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Ipsos MORI polled 1,039 adults and found that six out of 10 agreed that 'many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change', and that four out of 10 'sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say'. In both cases, another 20 per cent were not convinced either way. Despite this, three quarters still professed to be concerned about climate change.

So only 20% think the case is anything like settled. Sun must be getting to every body's brains.

The Observer (ie the Guardian on Sunday) are clearly sick at having to report this. John Redwood has a piece about it on his blog.Expect to see a lot more MPs putting their heads above the parapets as Ann Widdicombe did when she voted against the climate bill on the grounds that warming scam wasn't true. She described this as far more important than her decision to vote for 42 days.

HOW MUCH DO WE KNOW ABOUT ZIMBABWE?

Very little.

This is the problem when you know there is a long history of our media lying. A BBC which described the ex-SS auxiliary & public supporter of genocide, the Bosnian Moslem leader Izetbegovic as a "moderate minded Moslem committed to a multicultural Bosnia", may or may not be slightly more truthful this time.

I don't know that everything they tell us about Zimbabwe is a lie but I don't know that it isn't & I do know that the people saying it are prepared to tell any lie. I also know that we don't get to hear from the people being demonised. The last time I saw some real foreign policy opposition on TV was when the Chinese ambassadress appeared on C4 News to defend their record in Tibet - she knew her facts & took John Snow apart - he was reduced to saying that the guards around the Olympic flame weren't competitively chosen students from across China but secret police because our press had said so.

My problems with the story we get:

Sir Robert Mugabe used to be a fine upstanding example of how Britain's example could produce moderate successful governments (hence his knighthood). Now he is "another Hitler". When exactly did he metamorphosis & was there any sign of it other than taking over from white farmers, who after all, are the hardly the world's most oppressed minority?

What else has Zimbabwe done that makes it more worthy of our attention than, for example, Congo?

How much is the place's economic chaos is down to its own government & how much to western formal & informal sanctions because if the latter then blame does not lie fully with him?

Is Morgan Tsvangirai & his lot really more democratic than his opponent or are they merely our thugs against their thugs? Is this case merely supporting the leader of 1 tribe rather than another?

Are we funding his campaign, as we did in Serbia, Ukraine & Georgia among others? If not who is?

Have we any plan for what to do in the event we move in? For example much of Africa's problems are that state boundaries have nothing to do with ancient tribal/national boundaries but were drawn on maps in London & Paris. I suspect dividing it into 2 countries on ethnic lines would work best - Basuto is about the only successful subsaharan state & is relatively ethnically homogeneous. However I see no sign anybody has even been thinking of this let alone prepared to do it.

It is clear that Zimbabwe has had a somewhat democratic first round & if Mugabe didn't win he came close. Not like Saudi then, whose leader is apparently a fine fellow. There certainly are a lot of people willing to vote for Mugabe. If everything we are told is true why is that?

My suspicion is that this is merely the current TV war being rolled up for our entertainment & distraction in the best tradition of the Roman gladiatorial games. We also see the public being ramped up to face this week's hate figure. We seem to have had a lot this year - Mugabe, Sudan, the Chinese, the Burmese & of course al Quaeda (though bin Laden himself has almost become an unperson). The problem with gladiatorial games, however entertaining, is that real people die. Are our actions against that country doing the locals any good & is there any prospect that even if successful (looking at Iraq & Yugoslavia perhaps particularly if successful) they ever will?

If not we should abide by the rule of law & mind our own business. Is there any case since Korea when intervention to "help" another country has actually done so? Is there not a long history of it turning out that the "good guys" we were putting in were more corrupt, less competent & no nicer than the "baddies" we were taught to hate? If not we should at least examine how to do it better before killing more.

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And in complete contrast to that here is a suggestion I made of how to at least do it while keeping our own hands casualties down - though perhaps the locals would welcome us, a promise I have heard before: